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302 LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS

"To the honorable the Senate of the United States:

"The undersigned, being a delegation representing the colored people of
the several States, and now sojourning in Washington, charged with the duty
to look after the best interests of the recently emancipated, would most
respectfully, but earnestly, pray your honorable body to favor no amendment
of the Constitution of the United States which will grant any one or all of the
States of this Union to disfranchise any class of citizens on the ground of
race or color, for any consideration whatever. They would further respectfully
represent that the Constitution as adopted by the fathers of the Republic
in 1789, evidently contemplated the result which has now happened, to wit,
the abolition of slavery. The men who framed it, and those who adopted it,
framed and adopted it for the people, and the whole people — colored men
being at that time legal voters in most of the States. In that instrument as it
now stands, there is not a sentence or a syllable conveying any shadow of
right or authority by which any State may make color or race a disqualification
for the exercise of the right of suffrage; and the undersigned will regard
as a real calamity the introduction of any words, expressly or by implication,
giving any State or States such power; and we respectfully submit that if the
amendment now pending before your honorable body shall be adopted, it
will enable any State to deprive any class of citizens of the elective franchise,
notwithstanding it was obviously framed with a view to affect the question
of negro suffrage only.

"For these and other reasons the undersigned respectfully pray that the
amendment to the Constitution, recently passed by the House and now,
before your body, be not adopted. And as in duty bound, etc."

It was the opinion of Senator Wm. Pitt Fessenden, Senator Henry
Wilson, and many others, that the measure here memorialized against would,
if incorporated into the Constitution, certainly bring about the enfranchisement
of the whole colored population of the South. It was held by them to
be an inducement to the States to make suffrage universal, since the basis of
representation would be enlarged or contracted, according as suffrage should
be extended or limited; but the judgment of these leaders was not the judgment
of Senators Sumner, Wade, Yates, Howe, and others, or of the colored
people. Yet, weak as this measure was, it encountered the united opposition
of Democratic senators. On that side, the Hon. Thomas A. Hendricks of
Indiana, took the lead in appealing to popular prejudice against the negro. He
contended that among other objectionable and insufferable results that would
flow from its adoption, would be, that a negro would ultimately be a member